Reading for Liberalism

The Overland Monthly and the Writing of the Modern American West

Stephen J. Mexal

Publication Year: 2013

Founded in 1868, the Overland Monthly was a San Francisco–based literary magazine whose mix of humor, pathos, and romantic nostalgia for a lost frontier was an immediate sensation on the East Coast. Due in part to a regional desire to attract settlers and financial investment, the essays and short fiction published in the Overland Monthly often portrayed the American West as a civilized evolution of, and not a savage regression from, eastern bourgeois modernity and democracy.

Stories about the American West have for centuries been integral to the way we imagine freedom, the individual, and the possibility for alternate political realities. Reading for Liberalism examines the shifting literary and narrative construction of liberal selfhood in California in the late nineteenth century through case studies of a number of western American writers who wrote for the Overland Monthly, including Noah Brooks, Ina Coolbrith, Bret Harte, Jack London, John Muir, and Frank Norris, among others. Reading for Liberalism argues that Harte, the magazine’s founding editor, and the other members of the Overland group critiqued and reimagined the often invisible fabric of American freedom. Reading for Liberalism uncovers and examines in the text of the Overland Monthly the relationship between wilderness, literature, race, and the production of individual freedom in late nineteenth-century California.

Cover

Title Page

Copyright Page

Contents

Preface

After the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in
2003, it suddenly became popular to refer to the American West — the
Wild West, technically — as a way of making sense of the two wars. For
a number of soldiers, politicians, pundits, and journalists, the mythic
language of the nineteenth-century...

Introduction: Liberalism and the Language of Wilderness

In 1898, long after Bret Harte’s literary star had faded, Henry James
published a scathing critique of Harte in a London literary magazine.
James was concerned with what he called “schools” in American fiction
and felt that Harte, who had achieved his “literary fortune” nearly
thirty years earlier...

When the Overland began publishing in 1868, periodical culture
and the western travel industry were not as enmeshed as they would
become in subsequent years. But decades later, as the nineteenth
century drew to a close, magazines became increasingly complicit in
the ongoing conquest...

Chapter 2: Narrative and Liberal Selfhood:
Noah Brooks and the Aesthetics of History

At one point early in the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln sat
reading quietly with a friend and confidant named Noah Brooks
(1830–1903). Lincoln was already popularly known as the first “western”
president, and Brooks, then a correspondent for the Sacramento
Daily Union, was a western transplant...

Chapter 3: “With Which It Was My
Fortune to Be Affiliated”:
Social Contingency in the Life and
Poetry of Ina Coolbrith

On June 30, 1915, seventy-four-year-old Ina Coolbrith was crowned
the first poet laureate of California. Along with Noah Brooks, Anton
Roman, and poet and novelist Charles Warren Stoddard, Coolbrith
had been integral to the founding and growth of Bret Harte’s Overland
nearly a half-century earlier...

Chapter 4: The Limits of Liberalism:
Chinese, Indians, and the Politics of
Cosmopolitanism in the West

Just after Bret Harte left San Francisco to write for the Atlantic
Monthly, a young and still largely unknown satirist named Ambrose
Bierce published his first story with the Overland, a tale designed to
undercut conventional assumptions about western anti-Chinese prejudice.
“The Haunted Valley” was published...

Chapter 5: The Greening of Nineteenth-
Century Liberalism:
John Muir’s Wilderness and the
Discourse of Civilization

In 1903, while on a political jaunt through the West, President Theodore
Roosevelt asked John Muir to serve as his guide through Yosemite.
Muir was a writer, naturalist, and founder of the Sierra Club who had
gotten his start thirty years ago in the Overland Monthly, and Roosevelt
was a fan of his...

Chapter 6: The Brute’s Luck:
Liberal Egalitarianism and the
Politics of Literary Naturalism

The decades surrounding the Civil War saw tremendous upheaval
in the legal and cultural definition of personhood in the United States.
These decades were in fact the most crucial moments in the legal history
of American liberal individualism. Although the 1776 Declaration
of Independence...

Conclusion: The Overland Group, Luck, and
the Writing of the West

In preparing to launch the Overland Monthly, Bret Harte and Anton
Roman seemed to think the magazine could accrue cultural value and
foster the “material development” of the Pacific coast only if it was
positioned in a way that implied an affinity with, or an extension of,
genteel eastern literary...

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